PalmOS 6 To Be Based on BeOS

Just when it seemed like Palm intended only to forever mothball BeOS and all the Be engineering talent they bought, The Register reports that PalmOS 6 will be a genuine multitasking OS containing genuine chunks of BeOS code (rather than simply “inheriting DNA,” as Jean-Louis Gassee once said it would). ” Version 6.0 will be as dramatic a change for the platform as OS X was for Apple, or NT was for Microsoft. ”


Music: Charles Mingus :: Haitian Fight Song

2 Replies to “PalmOS 6 To Be Based on BeOS”

  1. I wouldn’t go as far saying this Scot. ;-)
    The article actually says that Michael Mace said that PalmOS 6 will have BeOS code, while the No2 in command, Steve Sakoman, said that there will be no BeOS code in there.
    I believe Steve Sakoman and not Mace.
    When the author of the article at TheRegister, Andrew Orlowski, had this discussion with Sakoman, I was sitting 1 meter away from him. :D
    I did a similar article on OSNews, but did not directly quote Sakoman when he said that there won’t be any BeOS code in there, because 30 minutes before that, I had directly asked the exact same question to David Nagel, and his reply was that there will be some “sound code” from BeOS but not anything else. So I did not want to bring the two men in “confrontation” claiming different things and I did not mention any of this. But I guess it does not matter anymore, Mace already “did it”…

    Personally, from all the details I have gathered, I agree with the last sentense of what Andrew wrote about the BeOS issue: “More likely, we suspect, the new OS will inherit some algorithms and architecture from BeOS.” But not code directly, at least for the most part.

  2. Thanks much for that, Eugenia – you’re way more in the loop than I am. So it turns out Gassee was pretty much right to begin with – “inheriting DNA.” In any case, whether there’s actual BeOS code or not hardly matters – even if it were full BeOS on a handheld, it wouldn’t be like using BeOS on the desktop…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *